Ava's Man

by Rick Bragg

  The history books showed it in black-and-white, and in my mind’s eye, as a child, I imagined it that way, a place just too mean for color. I saw a gray landscape under lead-gray sky, where white-robed Klan rode through dead gray trees, where convicts striped in gray and white swung picks into the bleached, colorless ground, where even the big rivers, in my mind’s eye, ran black as tar.

  In the text, we read of babies who died of scurvy because oranges cost too much for farmers to afford, and as I read I would imagine a ripe orange, in full color, not merely as an antidote for the scurvy but as an antidote for that whole sorry mess. Even now, when I see oranges, I think about that.

  But the foothills were not black, white and gray. They were loud, and green, and often splashed with red, and smelled of manure, and honey, and hot biscuit dough. There were women named Birthannie and mules named Rachel, and about the only things gray were those raggedy uniforms in the attic, which the women cut up and used for quilt scrap.

  To the south, where the land flattened out and turned from red to black, there was still a stained white remnant of a plantation culture in the late 1800s and beginning of the 1900s. But here, in the hill country, they would have fed the gentility to their dogs.

  Most of the Native Americans who survived the wars were marched out of the foothills at bayonet-point, on a shameful relocation called the Trail of Tears. By the Civil War, the deep woods belonged mostly to white men, but it would be wrong, maybe, to say that what they brought with them was civilization.

  Scots, Irish, English and French, men who had starved across the water, came to the foothills to farm, log hardwoods and pine, strip-mine granite, make whiskey, raise kids, hunt deer, breed hunting and fighting dogs, preach, curse and brawl. There were few slaves here because it was too hilly for big cotton—that required good bottomland—so the poor whites did most of the heavy lifting. They were a lot like the Irish who helped settle New Orleans, who came to dig canals and died in heaps from yellow fever because the slaves were just too valuable to waste.

  James B. Bundrum, the old rebel soldier, had not left his children much, and few of them could read or write. But in that bare-knuckled culture, his children—and Jimmy Jim, in particular—were at home. They grew in it, the way a weed grows in a crack in a sidewalk.

  Born just after the war, Jimmy Jim knew that the carpetbaggers, scalawags and burned-out Southerners would need lumber to rebuild this corner of the South, and he knew that a conquered people would have to drink, to heal or just forget. He could supply their needs.

  In the late 1800s, he married the former Mattie Mixon, a gentle woman the people here have long since prayed into heaven. She and Jimmy Jim had seven children together, William, Arthur, Oscar (Babe), Riller, Mag, Charlie and Shuley, in that order. The older children were already grown when Charlie, born in 1907, and then Shuley came along, and their house was often filled with nephews and nieces and cousins, like Claude, Babe’s son, who played with Charlie around the ramshackle farmhouse, throwing rocks, climbing trees, buck wild.

  Jim did not get rich cutting timber or making whiskey, but made a decent living, and the pasture outside the house was dotted with fat milk cows and the pockets of flatland were streaked with corn rows.

  They settled in Websters Chapel, Alabama, which had a reputation back then as a lawless place where men still lived by the feud and their enemies vanished under the leaves. Jim worked his sons hard, taking them to the forest when they were still just little boys. “He put my daddy on the log wagon, and he didn’t get off till he was twenty-two,” Claude said.

  It was brutal work. They hewed railroad crossties by hand, and broke rock in the quarries. Jimmy Jim was less than six feet tall, thin and gaunt, but he had forearms hard as fence posts and could bend a ten-penny nail in his fingers. And when he fought drunk, which was regular, it was terrible. There are many stories of violence attached to the man, but the one people recall most often is the one his grandchildren refer to only as “the finger.”

  It happened when Charlie was still a boy, around 1915, at a spot in Calhoun County called the Mill Branch, a beautiful clearwater spring where the hard drinkers gathered in the cool of the evening to swap lies and trade dogs and cut each other up a little bit, to settle differences. Rich men would have dueled and said the killing was over honor. Poor men just cut in anger, and sometimes there was honor in it and sometimes the man holding the bloody knife, his mind befuddled from whiskey, just went home and told his wife he reckoned the sheriff would be by, d’rectly.

  It wasn’t always a killing. Sometimes the men would just beat on each other until their fists bled, not like in Hollywood, but scrambling around on their hands and feet in the gravel, eye-gouging, cussing, mean and wicked in the glow from the massive, popping campfires.

  There were so many that the Mill Branch passed into legend. Old drunks are still drawn to that place, and now and then you will pass by there and see one of them sitting quietly in his car, sipping from a can wrapped in a brown paper bag, remembering.

  That particular night, as the mules stood tied to the oak trees and the whiskey cooled in the spring, one of the men insulted my great-grandfather, or my great-grandfather imagined he did. He might have just been too drunk to be sure, but he called the man a son of a bitch anyway, and that is usually enough, down here, to pick a fight.

  The man was drinking, too, which would have made it a fair fight, if Jimmy Jim knew how to fight fair, which he didn’t. They came together inside a yelling ring of onlookers, and it was, by most accounts, a mean and frightful battle. They landed licks that might have killed sober men, kicked at shins and stomped at toes and, it is certain, took the Savior’s name in vain over and over again, through mouths that dripped blood.

  The man he was fighting, a bigger man, clawed at Jimmy Jim’s face and finally got his hands on my great-granddaddy’s throat and began with all the strength in his arms and fingers to choke the life out of him. “I couldn’t get loose, I couldn’t break his holt,” Jimmy Jim said later. “I believe he’d of kilt me.”

  But a man who swings an ax all day has to have arms like iron and fingers like rivets, and Jimmy Jim slowly prised one of the man’s fingers from his throat, then another and another. But then the man hooked one of his fingers, maybe two, inside Jimmy Jim’s cheek, and just hauled back on it, tearing at the flesh, making Jim howl in agony. The man was trying to rip his cheek out, so Jimmy Jim did what he had to do.

  He bit off one of the man’s fingers at the second joint.

  It was not a clean bite, and witnesses said he had to gnaw a bit to get it done. The man started to wail, and my great-granddaddy spit and that was by God that. He just stood there, with blood running down his mouth, and grinned as the man sank to his knees, whimpering, holding his bloody hand.

  History is unclear as to which finger it was—it was too big to be the pinky, everyone agrees—or from which hand it was gnawed, but we know precisely what happened to it. Jimmy Jim took the finger home in the pocket of his overalls, and placed it on the mantel.

  Mattie, it is told, left the dreadful thing there on her mantel until Jimmy Jim sobered up, and then threw it in the yard, where it was snatched up by a chicken.

  If there was any softness in Jimmy Jim, it was held prisoner by the place, the culture and a closed mind. Mattie suffered.

  She was a small and humble woman who, weak from childbirth and crippled after her hip was shattered by a cow, worked herself to death. But behind her husband’s back she told her children long stories, sang songs that Charlie remembered a lifetime, and, even as she grew weaker, paler, thinner, she made her children laugh. She made up stories about the forest and the possums, wildcats, deer and bears that held Charlie and the other children rapt, stories better than any book, better than stories about beanstalks and such. Years later, when Charlie told them late in the evenings to his own children, it was Mattie they heard.

  “She was an awful good woman,” Claude said.

  Charlie, her
second-youngest, grew up to be his daddy’s son, yes, a whiskey man, brawler and all of it, but Mattie saved her boy just as surely as if she had stomped to death a serpent at his feet.

  Charlie did what his daddy told him, worked when he was told, and spent his days watching, learning. But as a man, when he talked about his family and that time, his daddy was just a name, but his momma was a bird flying.

  But as his momma taught him how to live, his daddy taught him how to stay alive. It was a time when the men still taught the woods to their sons, and Charlie learned from the best.

  Jimmy Jim moved like a shadow through the forest, his hobnailed boots soft as velvet slippers in the dry leaves. He and his brothers, all woodsmen, taught their sons how to get so close to a deer even a five-dollar rifle could not miss, taught them how to run a trotline and bait it cheap, with rank meat or stale bread, because catfish are just naturally stupid and a man would not waste a good worm on them. He taught his sons not to fear a scream in the night, even the panthers. He would take them into the woods and, when the cats screamed, grab their hands in a bone-crushing grip and hold them in place as the soft pad of feet passed. The little boys would jerk, pull and wail, but old Jim held tight, teaching.

  The old women, witch women and sin eaters said the panthers were not really animals but devils, and hounds would go crazy on their chains and the porch dogs would hide under the house when the screams started. Jimmy Jim didn’t give a damn. He would saddle his horse and load his 12-gauge and ride off into the night, not in search of panthers but to tend his still.

  Jimmy Jim made likker quietly on both sides of the state line in northern Georgia and Alabama, augmenting his sawmill and logging income, running off gallon after gallon and fooling the law, mostly, for decades in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was a family business. His brother, John Lewis, was in it, and they worked at it together until the revenuer men ran John Lewis clear up to the Tennessee River.

  That happened in 1891, in what family members still refer to as “the trouble.” John Lewis Bundrum was minding a still in Cleburne County when a revenuer, a federal man, surprised him. John Lewis vaulted on his mule and put the heels to him, but the revenuer was better mounted, and was slowly, slowly gaining.

  John Lewis reined in, stepped calmly down off the mule, drew a rifle from a tow sack, took careful aim and shot the revenuer’s horse, which effectively ended any pursuit.

  It was a Christian gesture—toward the revenuer, not the horse—but he would have been better off shooting the revenuer. He would not have been missed that much, revenuers being about as popular as itch.

  But a good horse is a good horse, and they might have hung him if he had not fled to the north, to Florence up on the Tennessee River. That seemed far enough, being almost in Tennessee. When he came home, almost a year later, he found that his wife had died of typhoid fever. Heartbroke, he left Alabama for Arkansas, and he is buried there, in Benton.

  If there was a lesson in what happened to John Lewis, his little brother, Jimmy Jim, failed to see it.

  By the time Charlie Bundrum was ten years old, his daddy was as well known for his likker as for his lumber. Jimmy Jim took Charlie to the woods with him to help carry the whiskey out, tote wood and watch out for revenuers. Before he was even a teenager, Charlie knew how the corn fermented into mash and how the pure, pale likker was distilled a potent, precious drop at a time. It was in his blood a long, long time before he ever took his first drink of it.

  Over time, Jimmy Jim left his older boys to do the lumber work and spent more and more time at his stills. The federal men and county deputies began to find them and when they did they poured out his mash and used axes to bust up his copper plumbing. Soon he was a wanted man. In the north Georgia mountains, they surprised him at his still but he lost them in the brush after some shooting, but no serious shooting.

  But the deputies and the federal men started watching his house and watching the roads, so he couldn’t come home, couldn’t see his wife and children. He went into hiding down in the flatland in south Georgia, as his small wealth dwindled, as his family suffered.

  He would hop a freight train or bum a ride and get off when he was close to Rome, and creep up to his door in the dead of night. But with papers out on him, he had to stay gone for years, and the little bit of money he was able to leave did not help much.

  When Charlie was twelve, Mattie’s hip was crushed by a kicking milk cow, and, her husband being a fugitive, there was no money for a doctor or hospital. The bones grew back wrong and she was deformed and lame, a woman who moved the rest of her life by swinging her whole body side to side. They lived in a shack. Their one salvation was that Jimmy Jim had left them with a few milk cows, and even though Mattie was crippled, she milked and churned butter. That, and charity, kept them alive.

  Riller, who was grown then and married to Tobe Morrison, a steel worker with a good job, came to the house one day and took the youngest, Shuley, to live with them. Kinfolks refer to it as “the day Riller stole little Shuley,” but they know she did it to feed him, to help.

  Charlie went to work for himself. He took a little wagon up into the woods, searching for pine stumps. He hacked them into sections, what folks here call knots, and sold them door to door for pennies. People used the slivers from the fat pine to start their fire. He swung an ax like a man and did any odd job he could find. He grew up that way, hard, but at night, if she wasn’t in too much pain, he and his momma talked until the fire burned out. I would like to have heard what they said. But I guess the words don’t matter all that much.

  There are few photographs of that time, but one, if you look at it hard and long enough, tells the story pretty well. It was taken when he was still a boy, during bad times.

  The photo’s backdrop is a ragged shack of rough, unpainted board and the windows, without glass, are covered by a flap of black tar paper. The poverty is burned deep into the print. But the boy in the foreground is not one of those pitiful, hollow-eyed urchins who stare up from photo books of the Appalachians. Instead, he has a faint, almost imperceptible smile, as if the hard-eyed kinfolks who pose with him just haven’t heard the joke yet.

  His sister Riller, already grown and married, stands beside him, her severe face framed by a black cloth hat. Someone has strung a garland of flowers, on a string or a vine, and looped it over the crown.

  Mattie died at fifty-four, when Charlie was barely fifteen, and her children buried her in the pretty graveyard at Mount Gilead Church, in Websters Chapel. Hills rise up from the cemetery on almost every side, creating deep shade around the church. It is a lovely place to rest, that little pocket of cool, quiet dark.

  Charlie never, ever talked about the funeral, about his momma in death, so I don’t know what was said, what was done for her. But in time I would learn that it is a tradition with us. We blot out the funeral—we erase the image of the coffin and the flowers and even the prayers—or at least we try. It is as if the dead just walked off somewhere, just after leaving us with a story, or a covered dish, or a whittled toy.

  I have always said my people are smart.

  By his momma’s death, Charlie was more man than most ever get, a tall, hard, strong and smiling man, as if he were immune to the fires that had scorched him, if not purified by them.

  He lived for fiddle music and corn likker, and became a white-hot banjo picker and a buck dancer and a ladies’ man, because women just love a man who can dance. At seventeen he could cut lumber all day, then tell stories all night, and people in the foothills said he would never settle down or maybe even amount to much. But the boy could charm a bird off a wire. And there seemed to be no fear in him, no fear at all. It was almost as if he had died already, met the devil and knew he could charm him or trick him or even whip him, because what did ol’ Scratch have left to show him that he had not already seen.

  His daddy was an upright citizen, toward the end.

  The warrants for Jimmy Jim’s arrest had all faded to yellow, and
he came home from the flat country to marry again, this time to a pretty nineteen-year-old girl named Ruth. But little Ruth died less than a year later in childbirth, and he buried her with the baby, an unnamed girl child, in a grave in Georgia, the still infant resting in her rigid arms.

  No one seems to know why the lawmen in the foothills, on either side of the state line, let him be. It may be he was older, and seen as less dangerous. It may be they just forgot him. He went to work making coffins, and traveled, visiting his children and grandchildren.

  It is mostly a myth, I believe, that men will mellow with time— there are men in my family who would hack off your ear as they waited to die in the nursing home—but Jimmy Jim seemed to change, to bend, I guess.

  I heard from my momma that he would go to his children’s houses and teach their wives how to make stew. He met my grandma, Ava, and Ava, hard to impress, said late in her own life that she liked the old man.

  It may be, as some said, he just felt hell licking at his ankles and tried to change. It happens a lot, down here. It is why a lot of the deacons are old men. But Jimmy Jim was not used up, not quite yet. At sixty-two, he married Dolee Semmes Fowler, and soon she was expecting a child.

  He had been a dramatic man all his life. But on February 15, 1927, his heart just stopped. It would have been more befitting his legend if Jimmy Jim had been shot down in a pistol fight. But he went out soft and quiet, like a cat leaving a room.

  They buried him in north Georgia, in the high mountains near Chattanooga. His last child, Vera, was born after his death.

  In the spring of 1994, a tornado, the storm of the century, tore across the mountain and dropped onto the Mount Gilead cemetery, knocking some of the headstones over and pulling others from the ground. Mattie’s headstone was untouched.

  4.

  Whistle britches